music business

The Listening Garden’s Cultivation of Audiophile Culture

The Listening Garden’s Cultivation of Audiophile Culture

Amidst the rise in hi-fi bars and resurgence of audiophile culture, pristine audio is only one component of what makes The Listening Garden’s music experience distinct.

What Wilco’s ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ Got Right About Music Streaming

What Wilco’s ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ Got Right About Music Streaming

Wilco’s net-streaming experiment with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was part of the utopian promise for technology’s future, and it worked.

For the Love of the Crappy Cassette Tape

For the Love of the Crappy Cassette Tape

The peculiar technology of the lo-fi, crappy cassette tape exemplifies the inherent contradictions of popular music better than any other medium.

What Puts the Pop in Pop Music?

What Puts the Pop in Pop Music?

As the Beatles learned, good music, even good looks, is seldom enough to break a band into the American mainstream. So what puts the pop in pop music?

When Record Labels Blasted Through the Barriers in Segregated America

When Record Labels Blasted Through the Barriers in Segregated America

While their motives were more mercenary than musical, American small record label impresarios could hear the barriers falling between the races right before their ears.

Primavera Sound Madrid Is a Cautionary Tale in Macrofestival Logistics

Primavera Sound Madrid Is a Cautionary Tale in Macrofestival Logistics

The inaugural Madrid edition of Primavera Sound, one of the world’s largest musical festivals, saw many of us trudging through mud like zombies in the middle of the night, exhausted and confused.

How Keith Richards’ Drug Bust Opened the Mainstream for Disability Activists

How Keith Richards’ Drug Bust Opened the Mainstream for Disability Activists

Keith Richard’s 1977 drug bust in Toronto led to the controversial “Blind Date” benefit concert in nearby Oshawa. Many benefited, but not in the way you think.

Does Gay Fandom Help Pop Divas?

Does Gay Fandom Help Pop Divas?

Looking at Rina Sawayama, Azealia Banks, Charli XCX, and Kim Petras’ rise and fall in the charts one wonders – does gay fandom help pop divas’ careers?

How Musicians Are Surviving the Pandemic — and the Music Industry

How Musicians Are Surviving the Pandemic — and the Music Industry

Nine US-based musicians discuss surviving and adapting to the changing music industry in our extraordinarily challenging time of pandemic shutdown.

How to Rap with a Sword: milo, Rapitalism, and Feeding Hunger with Thingness

How to Rap with a Sword: milo, Rapitalism, and Feeding Hunger with Thingness

Few of us devote much time to thinking about what a lifetime of labor is, especially creative labor. Milo is the kind of artist who invites us to think about it.

The (Indie) Music Industry Is All Right